10/23/01

Writing on SFGate, a website associated with the
San Francisco Chronicle,
"longtime journalist and iconoclast" Harley Sorensen advanced
another conspiracy theory: that U.S. military jets shot down flight 93
in rural Pennsylvania and is now lying about it. Sorensen's evidence:
"Flight 93's 'black box,' the flight recorder, has been recovered,
but so far the government hasn't seen fit to allow the press or the
public to hear what was on it. The government also refuses to give out
the names of the fighter pilots known to be flying in the vicinity of
Flight 93. Because we don't know who they are, they can't be
interviewed."

Sorenson also makes much of Vice President Cheney's relatively low
profile at a time when President Bush was often available to the
press. "Cheney's absence doesn't pass the smell test. It smells
fishy. Is he hiding because he doesn't want to answer questions about
Flight 93?" Sorenson also repeats a now-discredited assertion first
advanced in May by Robert Scheer,
that Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the Taliban
with a $43 million check as part of the War on Drugs, allegedly to pay
farmers not to grow opium. In fact, the reference is to a food
assistance program administered by the United Nations
and associated non-governmental organizations. At the time, Powell
specifically stated that the aid "bypasses the Taliban, who have done
little to alleviate the suffering of the Afghan people, and indeed
have done much to exacerbate it."

[Ed.: Come to think of it, we haven't heard from Pierre Salinger
about his thoughts on recent events. He must know too much about the
downing of Flight 800 a few years ago....]